Urbicide and Environmental Crimes in Ukraine: Feminist Perspectives and Cultural Processing

On October 27 and 28, 2023, the conference “Voices from Ukraine: Women Philosophers and Scientists Against War and Ecocide“ took place. This significant event was organized by Prof. Dr. Kateryna Karpenko, Director of the Center for Gender Education of the National Medical University (KHNMU), and Prof. Dr. Ruth E. Hagengruber, Director of the internationally acting Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. The conference addressed two pressing issues of our time: patriarchal violence and its connection to war and ecocide.

The central focus of the discussion was on the destruction of nature and the role of women in resisting environmental crimes. In the long tradition of women philosophers, reflecting on the destruction of nature holds a central place. In times of war, the destruction of nature often goes hand in hand with the violent oppression of women.

Urbicide from a Feminist Perspective

A contribution to the conference was the presentation by Prof. Dr. Inna Golubovich, Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Odessa National University named after I.I. Mechnikov, and Prof. Dr. Farida Tikhomirov, Associate Professor at the same university. Entitled “Urbicide in Contemporary Feminist Studies and Women Cultural Practices”, the lecture shed light on the deliberate destruction of urban living spaces (urbicide) as an expression of patriarchal violence in the context of war. Feminist perspectives were linked with cultural practices to understand the impact of urbicide on women and communities.

The speakers illustrated how the violent destruction of cities and infrastructure is deliberately used to weaken social structures and how women process this destruction both intellectually and artistically. Urbicide is not only understood as physical annihilation but also as a symbolic attack on identity and cultural memory.

Environmental Crimes in Ukraine: The Role of Social Media

Another contribution came from Prof. Dr. Olga Ryabchenko, a scholar at the H. S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University and visiting academic at the University of Cambridge. Her presentation, titled “Nature and Environmental Crimes of Russia in Memes of Ukrainian Social Networks”, examined the representation of environmental crimes through the creative use of memes. Social networks not only document environmental disasters and the consequences of war but also provide satirical and critical commentary.

The analysis of meme culture showed how young people reflect on and process the destruction of their environment. Social media serves not only as a means of criticism but also as a tool for mobilizing resistance and solidarity. It creates a hybrid form of cultural processing that highlights the power of digital media in activism.

We would also like to draw your attention to the book “The Struggle of Ukrainian Women for the Right to Higher Education: Historical and Philosophical Perceptions of Liudmyla Smoliar”, published by Prof. Dr. Kateryna Karpenko in collaboration with the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists:

The article examines the conceptualization of the struggle of Ukrainian women for the right to higher education by the Ukrainian historian Liudmyla Smoliar. In the book The Past for the Sake of the Future, she analyzed this topic in a socio-political and cultural context. The researcher noted that under the influence of the social movement of the early 1860s, women were allowed to study at the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Achievements and victories of the pioneers of this field were interspersed with obstacles and new prohibitions. Economic dependence on parents, and then on husbands, outdated legal norms, and political discrimination forced women to look for ways of self-realization. Summarizing the circumstances in which women had to assert their right to education, the researcher concluded that women gradually achieved convincing success, overcoming numerous obstacles at each stage of the arduous struggle for their rights to higher education.